PACK WILL WIN...

Take the word of ESPN NFL analyst's Mike Golic, Marcellus Wiley, Sean Salisbury, Mark Schlereth, Seth Wickersham, Merril Hoge, Ron Jaworski, Eric Allen, and Chris Mortensen. All of em have the Pack winning on saturday. I don't proclaim to be some sort of NFL guru...but these guys are. So I'll go with them on this one. GO PACK GO!

Gay Chris Berman is the lone dissenter, but he's not an NFL expert, so who cares.

The "anal" - lysts like to pick team's with mystique and aura but, as Kurt Schilling said, Mystique and Aura are just a couple of strippers after the ball is kicked-off. Everyone loves the Packers (even me...I have an original Bart Starr football card...he was my favorite player when I was a kid). But all that fades away come game time. One more thing on analysts...look how good they got the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.

I think the Packers certainly deserve to be the favorites with a 13-3 record against tougher opponents. But those who write the Seahawks off do so at their risk. Here's why..

Despite what some wishful thinkers in Packer-land seem to think, experience matters. The Seahawks have been in the playoffs five straight years. The Packers have the youngest team in the league. Favre makes up for some of that but not all of it. Young players in their first playoff game are in a position to make their first playoff mistake and when they do they tend to play to not make another mistake instead of winning the game. That's where experience comes in. The Seahawks players know that when you screw up that there's just another play coming at you in 30 seconds.

If the Packers young offensive line starts making mistakes and panic then Favre is going to spend a lot of time on his butt. They'll probably need to have two guys on Patrick Kearney all day which means one less guy in a pass route. I read lots of posts this week about how tough the Pack is when they have five receivers. Well, when they have five receivers they'll also have one less guy to block.

Also, Lambeau field is over-rated in terms of home field advantage. Over their past three post-season games the Packers have lost two. The game they won - against the Seahawks - came in overtime. They played the Packers tough in 04 and last year against the Bears they again lost in an overtime game - a game they easily could have won - with a much weaker team than they have this year.

Put it this way. The Seahawks are not the kind of team that's going to be intimidated. They may not win but I give them a good chance to upset the Packers.

Analysts are analysts. They look at the same stuff us fans look at, except the difference between us and them is they get paid to talk about it.

It all comes down to execution at game time.

I don't think there's much argument that the Packers on paper are a better team, but I would never write off Seattle. They have an underrated QB, a solid WR corps and a very underrated D, plus a Coach who has won a SB before. Any time you play a team with four Pro Bowlers on the D, you have to be concerned.